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Tag: weather

My oh my, I do believe it’s a cloud. I haven’t seen one of them in a looooooong time!

It is 3 degrees outside. THREE. Today is Wednesday. On Sunday, as in, three days ago, it was 28 degrees celcius.
Again, I will reshare one of the gems I saw on Twitter:
“Highs of 40C, lows of -3, strong winds direct from the artic and swarms of savage mosquitos. WTF do I wear?? #CanadaProbz”

I thought it was a peculiarly British thing to talk about the weather, but here it seems to be almost a competition to see which province suffers the worst. “aah, but Saskatchewan gets sunshine and dry heat, not like the humidity in Toronto, it’s suffocating in ‘Tranno'” and so on.

Despite the sudden dip in temperature, the city is really beautiful at the moment, with falling golden leaves and crispy sunshine. I think it’s the sun that does me so much good. In the UK, you can expect at least 9 months of GREY. Not necessarily rain, (though there is still more than enough of that!) but just not-hot, not-cold, not-sunny, overcast, unexciting GREY, for most of the year. I found it incredibly depressing. It made an unpleasant town look even more ugly, and I do believe it made people (myself included) far more grumpy than if we’d all been living in the Mediterranean or somewhere. Here in Saskatchewan, the temperature swings wildly between both extremes and the seasons change very fast indeed, but the sunshine is more or less constant. I am reliably informed that Saskatchewan gets more sun than any other province, (bad news if they want to boast to Ontarians about how tough the weather is here) Estevan (about 2 hours south east of here) is the sunniest place in Canada! It is not always hot sun, when we were here in november, it was steadily in minus-double-figures but STILL sunny and bright. This does my general wellbeing a lot of good. Sunshine makes me happy.Bright skies, autumn colours.

One thing I am sad about though, is that There Is No More Corn. Miranda and I became a little addicted to eat sweetcorn on the cob for the past couple of months, and since it was grown relatively locally, the stuff was ABUNDANT. I watched the prices with interest – it was conspicuously seasonal. When the first large batches arrived in the supermarkets, it was 77 cents a cob. The lowest we saw it was at the beginning of September when it was down to 32cents. Two weeks ago, Carl bought 4 cobs for $3 at the Farmer’s Market, and now, there is NONE in our regular supermarket at all, and the eye-wateringly expensive local Safeway branch is selling it for nearly $5 for four small, pre-cut, vacuum-packed cobs imported from who-knows-where. Waaa!! Miranda is going to be devastated. If we let her, she would eat sweetcorn and sausages for every meal.

I think we need to get her hooked on Pumpkin now!“Worm Pie for dessert, whoopee!!”(Seriously, I will buy a coffee for anyone – other than my parents – who can tell me where that reference comes from!!)

Tonight wasn’t quite as good an outing as I was hoping for, sadly! There were a lot of “Get Lit” writer-ish events on tonight at Artesian, which is a live venue up the road from us that I have not yet managed to visit. However, whatever was going on there tonight said strictly “no minors allowed” – so not the sort of thing I could bring Miranda to, annoyingly! But anyway, we’ve done poetry and stories, so tonight was going to be Music night. Better still, said music was happening in a big tent, in the park right opposite the coffee house, 200 yards to walk! Actually, I didn’t see the tent go up, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t there last night….

Miranda was still munching her shepherd’s pie at 6pm when it started (I made Shepherd’s pie tonight because Tanneille was playing a song about Shepherd’s Pie at work this morning!?) so we missed the first session – a singer/songwriter woman. Whoever she was, she wasn’t very loud since we couldn’t hear any of it from across the road!

We went over in time to catch Chad Kichula and the Douglas Avenue Garage Band. They were pretty loud and very good in a generic rock sort of way. The other guitarist (not the eponymous Chad) looked worryingly like Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, complete with wellies!!! Now there’s a cultural reference few round here will get! I took a few photos but my camera battery was nearly dead, so here they are performing in Banff, from youtube:

According to some bloke I follow on Twitter, there was winds straight from the arctic forecast for today, and I can well believe it – it is suddenly wet and FREEZING again!! Another huge swing in the climate, and it’s hard to believe we got a bit sunburnt on Sunday. Anyway, unfortunately Miri just got too cold and too tired to enjoy it, even when I took her to the sliiiiiiiiiide and climbing frame at the other end of the park. i had wanted to see the next band, The Lonesome Weekends, who were headlining. I have no idea what they are like, but I have seen a lot of people round here wearing Lonesome Weekend t-shirts, so they are either good or local or both. Plus the name is kinda apt for me at the moment 😦 But Miri was definitely not a happy beastling, so we went home again and watched a few of her beloved Octonauts instead, poor baby!

I guess I will have to look up the Lonesome Weekends on youtube really….